Earlier this week, I wrote briefly about the decision by US District Court Judge Martin Feldman to strike down the Obama administraton's six month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling. Heavily invested [PDF] in oil and energy companies, Feldman's ruling seems more than a little... Well, let's say, "off."See, it's not the investments themselves that throw doubt on the ruling. After all, it's entirely possible for a ruling to be good for investors and just at the same time. It's that his logic seems to be a real stretch. In his decision, Feldman wrote, "The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an unprecedented, sad, ugly and inhuman disaster. What seems clear is that the federal government has been pressed by what happened on the Deepwater Horizon into an otherwise sweeping confirmation that all Gulf deepwater drilling activities put us all in a universal threat of irreparable harm." So despite the the failure of a offshore platform anyone at BP, Transocean, or Halliburton would've told you was safe, we can't assume that other platforms are dangerous. Let me put this to you another way. The fact that there weren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic is no reason to start putting lifeboats on other ships. There's no proof that other ships might sink. So let's not get crazy.
Of course, there is reason to believe that other rigs are just as screwed up as Deepwater Horizon. For one, the overseeing agency -- the Minerals Management Service -- has been completely dysfunctional since 2002 at least. In 2008, an Interior Department's Inspector General for a deeply corrupt agency, with regulators doing cocaine and meth -- meth -- with lobbyists, open bribery, and a "culture of marketing," where the focus wasn't on extracting safely, but just extracting more. What Feldman is saying is, "The meth-head says the rigs are fine -- who are we to question that? Twitchy McFrybrain here is, after all, the expert."...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
